Taking No Hostages...

So I have been absent for over a year and a half, partly because I've been busy, but mostly because I did not feel that I had anything to say that anyone would be interested in reading.  Even if someone was reading.

Simply put, I had a series of major changes in my life, all linked, and happening in what seemed to me to be a rapid succession of cause and effect. 

I was happy about none of it.   

So what to do with my now empty days and nights?  

My kitchen more or less BEFORE

Call all my friends and cry on their shoulders until they began avoiding me? Nah. 

Write it all out here so my private life would be spooled on so many backup tapes and archived for a hundred years? Again, nah. 

Maybe curl up in a fetal position on my bed at night and cry myself through it all?  

Definitely, nah.

Instead I did something that I had been wanting to do for a very long time, but my ex and I could never agree on what was to be done....  I remodeled my house. Not that I could afford it, but thanks to some timely offers of deferred interest from some local do-it-yourself retailers, I pulled it off.

So days at work and working nights.  It took eleven months. If I could have rustled up some more credit, I'd still be at it.

More or less AFTER

Some rooms got just paint, others got more.  Ceiling fans, light fixtures, paint, furniture, drapes, floors, cabinets.. nothing was sacred.  For the first few months, my right hand held little but a three pound sledge hammer.  I had lived in this house for nearly nineteen years and had changed only the laundry room and a bathroom.  Now those were the only rooms semi safe (although the bathroom did get a change of towels and shower curtain). The kitchen would be the biggest change. Lights, cabinets, floors, ceiling, counter tops... the works.

This would be my sanctuary, my therapy, the route to a new life.  I would do it myself (which I did about 98%). I would not go down, and if I did, I was not taking anybody down with me.

No hostages.

Having a head cold is not the same as having a cool head

 I hope you will excuse my recent absence as the New Year has brought me the opportunity to explore the staggering semi-liquid production capacity of my nasal passages in the form of a whopping great head cold.  A journey which I continue this morning.  

I have also been struck by the amazing resistance, which my affliction exhibits, to all forms of remedy, store bought names, generics, and home styled.  No matter the active ingredient, nor the manufacturer, all seem to be totally ineffective.  

At one point it was suggested that it might be an allergy and not a cold at all.  But alas, Allergy meds from A to Z have also been tried only to find their way to the kitchen dustbin in miserable failure.

Felled by my cold have been boxes of various name brand facial tissues, all of which I now equate to the coarsest and most abrasive sand paper.

No sneezing, no “itchy eye,” no fever, or ache, just a continuous production of ever changing colors and consistencies as tissues by the truckload are filled and tossed away.

So excuse me for not participating in all the resolutions, hoopla, and joy exhibited by some.  I'm just not up for it right now.  

Happy Fricken New Year.

Yellow Ink

My brand not pictured

I needed an ink cartridge.  My printer was insisting that it could not go on until the yellow ink cartridge, which had run out, was replaced.  It insisted on this even though the tax document I was attempting to print contained no yellow.

Unable to convince the stubborn machine otherwise, I headed out for our local office supply store.  The printer is not a newer unit (more than two years old...imagine), so the outlets available to buy new ink are limited.   Why not replace it with a newer model?  It works very well, it's connected to our little intranet and everyone uses it.  It also has, what seems to be a vanishing attribute, a straight through paper path.  What I mean is, the media that you are printing on does not need to bend as it moves through the printer.  This is very handy when printing business cards, clear vellum sheets for overhead projection and other media that is not simple #20 inkjet paper.

I had a different brand of printer that had only two initials as a name and it had a folding paper path.  the continual jams, stutters, and waist brought about its sad and untimely demise on the office floor.   With a few kicks to be sure the beast was dead, I went and bought the printer we are still using today.

The one that is currently out of yellow ink.

I hear on the TV and radio how poorly the economy is doing and how retailers are struggling to get by with a skeleton staff.  Its very hard for them to keep the doors open.  You could not prove it by the parking lot of the mall outside the office supply store. Its 114 degrees in the shade (of which there is none) and the lot is full to brimming over. 

Cars are parked on any available open spot, marked or not, making the search for an open spot more like the "Dodge-um" amusement park ride than a .. well... search for an open parking spot.  After circling the lot and watching the temperature gauge on my old minivan slowly climb towards the red line, I finally slip into a spot that is not completely out of sight of the office supply store.

Victory! 

"Too bad for you, slackers," I smile as other cars pass by my old van with heated scowls.  For a moment, I actually entertained the idea of realigning my parked vehicle in its spot, just to watch the circling parking piranhas come flying together only to be disappointed as my van slipped back into the same parking spot.  Muhahahaha!

But the moment passes and I pause to survey the trek ahead of me across the hot asphalt.  I should have brought water. 

And maybe a camel.

Crossing the parking lot is no easy task.  Pass between parked vehicles is safe enough, so long as you watch where and in what you are stepping.  I learned long ago the little green puddles can be as slippery as sheets of ice and catching your balance by placing bare skin on a sun baked, painted car hood can be just as painful as landing on the asphalt.  But the most dangerous by far is crossing the streams.  Referred to as "access drives" or "lanes" by the uninitiated, they are streams filled with creatures more deadly and unpredictable than anything in the rivers of Africa or the Amazon jungle... impatient drivers.   Some are on the hunt for a parking spot, others attempting to escape the mall altogether.  Each are equally desperate.  Each are equally dangerous should an opening arise with you in between them and their intended target.  Having just been one of the pack, I wave them by, patient waiting for my opening to cross. 

Sweat is running down my back as I enter the store and a chill runs through me as I plunge my body into 78 degree conditioned air.  I'm greeted with a hollow "welcome to ..." by one of the minimum wage drones behind the service counter who does not even look up to see me as she speaks.  I make no attempt to get her attention or even reply, but make my way to the aisle with its perforated gondolas filled with ink cartridges in sealed plastic hangers.  All the brands are here and even some generic refill kits.  And my brand hangs right here....

Hey.  It's gone.

"Can I help you" asks a young girl covered in her "Big Box Store" smock.

"My ink is gone," I say pointing to a display now filled with another brand.

"We moved those down here," she says as she leads me to the far end of the aisle.

"But its not here either," I say as my eyes dart from one packaged ink to another, "its the one with a guitar on the box."

"Those are over here," she says point to an opposite row.  "Personally, I don't like those because its hard to read the box."

"It has a guitar on the box.  Its the only one with a guitar on the box.  Others have horses, or butterflies, or something, but only one has a guitar on the box."  My explanation failed to impress her.  "There are only singles here," I pointed out questioningly.  "Where are the multipacks?"

"I don't know," she said, "we might have them online."

I thought of my printer which is stopped mid page and demanding an ink cartridge which it did not need.  Could it sit that way while I wait for ink to be delivered?  I shook off the thought and resigned myself to paying $20 for a single ink cartridge.  I would find the multipacks somewhere else, perhaps online...

Producing the proper "member" card saved me nothing, but it did inform the management that there was still someone stupid enough to be buying ink single packs and just who that idiot was.  I maneuvered my way back to my old van and cautiously opened the door to allow the trapped heat to escape without singeing the hair in my mustache and eyebrows.  And a mere 20 minutes later I was approaching the exit. 

Back at my office I was greeted by my printer, still stopped mid-page, its little green and red lights blinking.  I pressed the red flashing button and the ink carriage swung out into the open where I could pop out the old yellow cartridge and snap the new one into place.  The printer jumped into life and ran its cleaning cycle to bring the new cartridge online, thereby being ready to not print yellow in the twenty-five page black and white tax form still in my computers print buffer.

Cleaning...

Cleaning...

AH! Here it goes.  The print head swings into position, data begins to move, and the computer beeps and stops. 

It would seem that the head cleaning was all that remained of the light cyan.

Going 3D with Blender 2.53

So at this point, I know nothing about 3D animation and graphics. I do understand using 3D environment in a 2D project, but it's hardly the same thing. I use Toon Boom Animate Pro for most of my projects now, having graduated from Studio to Digital Pro and finally to Animate Pro. For 2D, I don't think you can find a better program. It out flashes Adobe Flash© and runs circles around any other competition.

But this Blog is not about Flash or Toon Boom. It's about Blender. Specifically, Blender 2.5.

Wow.

I had downloaded Blender back in 2000 in the 2.0 or 2.1 phase. It was interesting, but I really was not into 3D graphics back then. It seemed awkward and clumsy, but so did all 3D programs.

I downloaded the new 2.53 beta is 22 megabytes (52.2 megabytes installed). I already had Microsoft C++ 2008 Redistributable Sp1 and Python 3.1 installed so installation went without a hitch.

Opening the program was a surprise. The new 2.5 menu layout was great. I had no idea what all the menus and buttons meant, nor what they actually did, but there was a big build view screen and menus to the left an right. It did take me a while to find the wiki documentation online and because this is a Beta version, the documentation is far from complete. But there are lots of great free online tutorial sites for 2.5 already (Blendercookie, Blendernoobies, and BlenderGuru ) and it's not all that hard to make the leap from the 2.49 tutorials (.Creative Cow, Lynda.com, and others). Honestly, they are everywhere and many are free.

In just a couple of evenings I was able to set my personal preferences, create my own version of the work space, and make this simple 3D text

Screen from my machine. Click to enlarge.

As I said, I have no CAD or other 3D experience, so as little as this is, it's big to me at this point. Below is a short video that outlines Blender's history


From Blender 3D 1.60 to 2.50 from Allan Brito on Vimeo.

There were some things I recognized right off the bat. Key Frame animation, by default the time line runs across the bottom of the screen, working with Bezier curves, Inverse kinematics and more.

I've been reading comparisons between the commercial softwares (Audodesk's Maya and others) and Blender, although slightly behind in some features, it seems Blender has lead the way in others and the new 2.5, when complete, should bring Blender up to the industry standards across the board

What does it take to run it? Lets do a simple compare with Maya:

Bender System Requirements
Operating Systems

• Windows 2000, XP or Vista
• Mac OS X 10.2 and later
• Linux 2.2.5 i386
• Linux 2.3.2 PPC
• FreeBSD 6.2 i386
• Irix 6.5 mips3
• Solaris 2.8 sparc

Minimal specs for Hardware

• 300 MHz CPU
• 128 MB Ram
• 20 MB free hard disk Space
• 1024 x 768 px Display with 16 bit color
• 3 Button Mouse
• Open GL Graphics Card with 16 MB Ram

Good specs for Hardware

• 2 Ghz dual CPU
• 2 GB Ram
• 1920 x 1200 px Display with 24 bit color
• 3 Button Mouse
• Open GL Graphics Card with 128 or 256 MB Ram

Production specs for Hardware

• 64 bits, Quad core CPU
• 8 GB Ram
• two times 1920 x 1200 px Display with 24 bit color
• 3 Button Mouse + tablet
• Open GL Graphics Card with 768 MB Ram, ATI FireGL or Nvidia Quadro

For 32-bit Autodesk Maya 2011

• Microsoft® Windows Vista® Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional (SP3 or higher), Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional operating system
• Windows: Intel® Pentium® 4 or higher, AMD Athlon™ 64, AMD Opteron™ processor, AMD Phenom™ processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 4 GB free hard drive space
• Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL® graphics card
• Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD-ROM drive
• Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
• 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
• HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
• Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 7.0 or higher, Apple® Safari®, or Mozilla® Firefox® web browser

For 64-bit Autodesk Maya 2011

• Microsoft Windows Vista Business (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition (SP2 or higher), Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, Apple Mac OS X 10.6.2, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.4 WS, or Fedora™ 11 operating system
• Windows and Linux: Intel® EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, AMD Opteron, or AMD Phenom™ processor
• Mac® computer: Intel-based processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 4 GB free hard drive space
• Qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card
• Three-button mouse with mouse driver software
• DVD-ROM drive
• Maya Composite media cache requirements for playback:
• 10 GB minimum, 200 GB recommended
• HDD: IDE, SATA, SATA 2, SAS, SCSI
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher, Apple Safari, or Mozilla Firefox web browser

Now that we know what it take in hardware, what does it take in GREENWARE?
Maya - $4000.00 plus a license for every machine it runs on.
Blender - Free (Contributions encouraged) and the same price for every machine it runs on - Free.

If you are just starting out or planning to expand your operation, it's worth a look.

Karen's Gypsy

The illustration at left was not done by me. Although I wish I had. It was done by my wife, Karen, a very talented scenic artist. This was done on a software platform called "Dabbler 2." By Fractal Design. It's rare for her to work on such a small scale as most of what she does is on a 30 X 60 foot muslin drop (I get her to give me some photos and I'll do a separate blog on painting really BIG.

I on the other hand have always been a cartoonist. Event the most serious sketches I have done always have a cartoon edge to them. That's why animation interests me so. I have piles of files of ideas that didn't work. My biggest problem is time, and perhaps I'm a bit lazy. My reason or excuse is that I have already put in 8 to 10 hours by the time I get home from work, then spend time with the pets, the family and dinner, and it's getting late. The job starts early.

The type of sketch cartoon I want to do does not really lend itself to the "cut-out" style of cartooning I have done so far. My attempts at drawing each frame ends up with me finishing a few seconds of animation after literally months of nights with my eyes watering as I try to finish one more frame before I go to bed.

Thus far none of the animations I started this way ever got anywhere. By the time it's just starting to take shape, I'm bored with the story and I'm ready to move on. What I need is to find a way to meld the two disciplines and figure out when to use which to move the story along.

But I have time, I think, thus far it's been an expensive hobby, but I've enjoyed myself.

From A Beginner Animator

I joined YouTube in 2007 planning to use it as an outlet for all the cartoons I would be making. It would be wondrous with a fantastic following.

And it almost happened that way.

The problem was, when I opened my YouTube "Channel" I knew almost nothing about creating cartoons. I had jumped in and was not prepared at all. At my disposal was Paint Shop Pro (Which was still owned by Jasc back then and was a lovely paint and photo program for $99 US) and The Microsoft Movie Editor which came with Windows® XP. Not much in the way of tools, but I had to come up with some sort of place holder for my channel. And this is what I posted:




It's still there actually, even though it's a rough bit of animation, it was, after all, my first.

I began to search for animation programs, not knowing what the heck I was looking for. I'm married and the father of two sons, so I had a tiny budget for starting a new "hobby." What I thought I wanted was Macromedia Flash, but I was surprised to find that it had been eaten by Adobe® and was now out of my price range (See? I wasn't a complete idiot, I did do some research). Any way pirate software was out, because I don't believe in it. A craftsman is worth his wages and all that (but not necessarily the triple wages Adobe was asking). Obviously Maya, 3d studio, and all were right out of my price range and I wasn't sure that 3D was something I should jump into. I mean, don't you need to crawl before you can walk? I came across ToonBoom. I got my first copy of ToonBoom Studio on sale for $250 US (it's $299. now). After pouring through the video tutorials and making several false starts, Two months later my first real cartoon/vlog appeared:





It was up on YouTube just a few weeks later when Lisasimpson, acting as a guest editor, she chose it to be featured on YouTube's front page. A very big deal in those days. At the same time, I had upgraded my computer hardware and the Windows installation crashed. I mean at the EXACT same time. My video went from 315 views in three weeks to 100,000 views that Sunday morning and I was oblivious to it all.

So now it's nearly 3 years later and I have uploaded a few more toons. Each takes a couple of months to build, the Vlog type are faster because I can reuse my character with only a few changes, but the long periods between uploads lost the audience. Now my toons are back where they started with a few hundred view, which is fine by me. I am still learning after all.

For the record, and through a long series of upgrades, I am now using ToonBoom Animate Pro2 as my animation platform. And although I would love to have the Adobe CS5 Production Premium Suite with all the bells and whistles, I still use Premiere Elements ($119 US) to do my editing. The FREE but extraordinary Audacity works overtime to record, edit and clean all my audio tracks. I finally bought my first version of ToonBoom Storyboard ($199 US) to help me assemble my ideas. And I would not be anywhere if it were not for the free music tracks so lovingly composed and shared by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).

And the last element is time. Lots of time. I you are reading this and just starting out, you can get into playing with animation programs on a budget. There are even rudimentary or watermarked programs out there for free even ToonBoom. But be ready to give lots of time. Watch you favorite cartoon and stay for the credits. All the names that go past are positions you must fill with your own time. It is very rewarding when you get it done, but the speed of the progress, or lack of it, especially when you have a day job, was and is my biggest frustration. But if you really want to do it, you can. I did, and I still know almost nothing.

Be Well